Want to reach the masses? Sometimes the best way to reach others is to take advantage of other people’s network reach. Influencer marketing is not new, but it is relatively new to social media as a vehicle for businesses to reach new prospects.
What is an Influencer?
Before we dig into the advantages of using influencers in marketing campaigns, lets settle on a working definition. Influencers can be famous, but most are not. People with large followings on social media platforms have been labeled influencers. From Twitter to LinkedIn, from Instagram to YouTube and beyond, one can find influencers are practically every social media platform.
Why Utilize Influencers in Business Marketing?
The appeal of utilizing other people’s large networks is simple, you don’t have to spend as much time building the network, to get the desired results and influencer marketing can come at a fraction of traditional advertising space. To be blunt, Influencer marketing can help you get farther faster, for less money.
Where Does One Find an Influencer for Hire?
You can hire Ira Bowman right here on Bowman Digital Media. See the menu for pricing and services.
Ira Bowman was just named one of the top 175 Top Influencers on LinkedIn by Derick Mildred with 197,000 followers at the time the list was published. Ira Bowman has thousands of followers on every major social media site and helps manage over 40 different business social media pages.
Looking for a place to hire more influencers? One such place to find Ira Bowman and many others is on Influencer Active, a website launched in 2021. This website has a host of influencers available for hire to create posts on a variety of platforms.
How to Make the Most of Influencer Marketing!
To get the most out of influencer marketing, companies need to identify who their target audience is, what platforms they are on and who already has their audience’s attention. When working with Influencers, Bowman Digital Media recommends that businesses use specially created discount codes and/or landing pages to help gauge campaign effectiveness.
A landing page is an individual page on a website, that is used specifically for one purpose, to track marketing efforts and effectiveness. For example, many businesses use landing pages with outbound SMS and Email marketing campaigns. Working with custom landing pages helps you track, through analytics how well the influencer is at driving website traffic. The discount codes in affect do the same thing, but for sales, when you don’t want to mess with a landing page.
Make Sure to Pick the Right Influencers!
The largest network holders are not always the best fit for every situation. Demographics of their audience is key to success in many campaigns. One influencer might have less overall followers but more concentrated following in a specific group. A business might higher what some label micro influencers because they have more followers in a certain income bracket, region, age range or lifestyle preference.
Beyond reaching the audience, the objective is for the influencer to help sway the audience to consider or try the brand. Again, this is where landing pages and custom discount codes help. If you have multiple campaigns happening at the same time, you can tell who or what is making the biggest impact and helping generate the best ROI.
Is Influencer Marketing a Fad or Here to Stay?
Social media is not going away. In fact, with television going the way of on demand consumption, social media use will likely continue its rise in the coming years as the single largest source of societal gatherings. Already there are people gathered daily by the billions on social media, rivaled only by search engines.
We live in an interesting time though as we saw television channels grow and audiences disperse over more channels, so too likely will social media channels arise and the audience thin out. Influencers and micro influencers will continue to be a large part of the story as these paradigm shifts happen. Companies have an amazing opportunity to tap into this newer method of reaching people before the thinning of the herd happens, to capitalize on their influencer marketing spend.
Moving forward into the future, the ROI will be less as more influencers will likely be needed to reach the audience over multiple platforms and most influencers typically have limited influence on all but one platform. That is one of the things that make influencers like Ira Bowman unique. With hundreds of thousands of followers across multiple platforms, those like Ira will become more valuable to marketing efforts of the smart businesses that employ them.